Using artificial intelligence to understand volcanic eruptions from tiny ash

Volcanic eruptions come in many different forms, from the explosive eruptions of Iceland's Eyjafjallaj&ouml;kull in 2010, which disrupted European air travel for a week, to the Hawaiian Islands' relatively tranquil May 2018 lava flows.

Conventional computer programs are quick to classify particles by objective parameters, like circularity, but the selection of parameters remains the task because simple shape categorized by one parameter is rarely found in nature.

Ash particles that are blocky when rocks are fragmented by eruptions, vesicular when lava is bubbly, elongated when particles are molten and squished, and rounded from the surface tension of fluids, like droplets of water.

This may allow for an additional layer of complexity to the data in the future, providing scientists better tools to determine eruption type such as whether an eruption was phreatomagmatic (like second phase of Eyjafjallaj&ouml;kull eruption in 2010) or magmatic (like flank eruptions of Mt.